David Alden wants to reinvent Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Since his impressive Met debut in 1979 with a revival of the opera, the New York-born director has staged this modernist classic six more times here and abroad. “It’s packed full of possibilities,” he says. “It’s truly about perspective shifts. So my interpretation is influenced by the nationality of the audience, by the social climate of the moment. At the Met I did a more or less old-fashioned historical version. In Los Angeles a couple of seasons ago it came to be about the post-Vietnam military’s hold on urban America. And in Israel the strange militaristic atmosphere there filtered through. I go which way the wind is blowing, who the cast is.” This week well find out which way it’s blowing at Lyric Opera, when Alden unveils the company’s brand-new production of Wozzeck, its first in over two decades.
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Alden and his designer partner Charles Edwards nabbed the assignment last winter shortly after the well-publicized split between the Lyric management and the team of Daniel Barenboim and Patrice Chereau. The Lyric had intended to bring over Chereau’s Paris production for its first-ever collaborative effort with a Chicago Symphony Orchestra maestro, but the sets were too cumbersome for the Civic Opera House’s stage. The stubborn French regisseur refused to modify the set design, and Lyric’s manager, Ardis Krainik, backed out, calling the whole mess “the greatest disappointment of my administration.” Barenboim chose to side with Chereau. Undaunted, Krainik quickly engaged the (less expensive) services of Alden and Edwards, and later gave Richard Buckley the conducting chores.
Alden, son of a TV writer and a Broadway dancer, grew up in New York City as an opera fanatic. He majored in English at the University of Pennsylvania but theater and opera were his first loves. Soon after graduating in 1971, he staged The Barber of Seville in Florida. “It was my first,” he recalls. “Then I went back to New York and did a lot of theater work, off-Broadway. I decided to stick with opera. I didnt go to a conservatory, but I was trained as a violinist and have a solid grounding as a musician. Of course my theatrical background has come in handy too.”
The curtain goes up on the Lyric’s new Wozzeck Monday, January 24, at 7:30 PM, at 20 N. Wacker, with seven more performances through February 19. The cast, singing in German, includes bass-baritone Franz Grundheber, reputedly the Wozzeck of our time, soprano, Kathryn Harries (Marie), tenor Graham Clark (Captain), bass-baritone Norman Bailey (Doctor), and tenor Mark Baker (Drum Major). Tickets axe $19-$96. A symposium on the opera will be held Saturday, January 22, from 10 to 5 at FIrst Chicago Center, Dearborn at Madison; Alden and Edwards will participate in a 1:30 roundtable discussion moderated by Krainik; tickets are $29. For more info call 332-2244.
